In 1995, Boles founded a small
DIY supply business, Longwall Holdings Limited, of which he is the non-executive chairman, having served as its chief executive until 2000. In 1998, he was elected as a Conservative councillor for the
West End ward on
Westminster City Council. He was chairman of the council's housing committee from 1999 to 2001, before stepping down in 2002. Boles was considered one of a group of young Conservatives, aligned with
David Cameron and
George Osborne, described as the
Notting Hill set. However,
Celia Barlow retained the seat for Labour. He was a candidate in the Conservative primary for the
2008 London mayoral election, but withdrew after being diagnosed with
Hodgkin's lymphoma. Boles recovered from his illness, and in October 2007, was selected as the prospective Conservative candidate for
Grantham and Stamford, then occupied by
Quentin Davies, who had switched allegiance from the Conservatives to Labour earlier in 2007. In the second half of 2008, he worked on preparing the Conservatives for government by meeting senior
civil servants to discuss how to implement Conservative policies if they won the next general election. Boles was elected as member for Grantham and Stamford in
May 2010 with a majority of 14,826. He was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Schools Minister
Nick Gibb in 2010. Boles was Minister for Planning between November 2012 and August 2014. In August 2014, Boles was appointed Minister for Skills, which included responsibilities for education and construction. The following February, he took a trip out of hospital after a third round of
chemotherapy in order to vote for the government's bill on withdrawal from the European Union. The tumour was eradicated by chemotherapy.
2019 resignation On 16 March 2019, Boles resigned from his local Conservative Association after disagreeing with them about his rejection of leaving the EU with no deal. The local association had been considering deselecting him as candidate at the next election, due to the disagreement. On 1 April 2019, Boles resigned from the
Conservative Party following the announcement of the results of the second round of indicative votes on exiting the European Union. He had been a proponent with
Oliver Letwin of the "Common Market 2.0" proposal, which failed at 261 - 282 votes, and reportedly felt "furious", "upset" and "let down" by fellow MPs who had promised to vote in support of his proposal, and at party
whips who had attempted to persuade MPs to abstain on the proposal, despite declaring it to be a
free vote. He stated in his resignation speech that: : "I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and political cohesion. I accept that I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, that I can no longer sit for this party." He subsequently described himself as sitting as an "Independent Progressive Conservative" until parliament was dissolved on 6 November 2019.
Policy positions In 2010, Boles argued that the coalition government was the true inheritor of
Blairism, and called for former Labour Cabinet ministers—
David Miliband,
James Purnell and
Andrew Adonis—to join the government. This echoed a similar call from his close friend,
Michael Gove, for Purnell, Adonis and
Hazel Blears to serve a Conservative government. Later that year, Boles also called for the coalition to remain until after 2015 in the form of an electoral pact. Boles has called for the forming of a "national liberal" faction within the Conservative Party, formed of social liberals with fiscally conservative views, and suggested some Conservative candidates might benefit from running for election under that name to win over voters who did not consider themselves conservatives. In July 2012, Boles used a speech at the
Resolution Foundation think tank to call for: • An end to winter fuel payments, free prescriptions, free bus travel and free TV licences for better-off pensioners; • A postponement of deciding on full implementation of
Andrew Dilnot's solution to the future funding of social care until the next comprehensive spending review; • A cut of £10.5 billion from welfare bills by 2016–17 and devising a better solution to support parenting of young children than the
Sure Start programme which he describes as "demonstrably ineffective". a
think tank which advocates an interventionist approach to foreign policy, in December 2016. In 2012, he was listed as a participant in that year's
Bilderberg Group meeting. Boles supported the Remain campaign in the
European Union membership referendum in 2016. After the referendum vote to leave the EU, he favoured a
Norway-style relationship between the UK and the EU after
Brexit, and strongly opposed a no-deal Brexit. Boles said in December 2018: "If at any point between now and 29 March [2019] the government were to announce that 'no deal' Brexit had become its policy, I would immediately resign the Conservative whip and vote in any way necessary to stop it from happening." Boles supports
Land Value Tax. While an MP Boles, who had suffered a life-threatening illness before supporting the campaign, in 2018 became the chairman of the
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Choice at the End of Life, which believes that terminally ill patients should have the right to an assisted death.
After parliament Boles did not stand as a candidate in the 12 December 2019 election. He endorsed the
Liberal Democrats in the
2019 election, but then revealed that he had in fact voted for the
Greens. During the
2022 local elections, he announced that he would be voting
Labour, and said that he had also done so in
1997. Boles had previously stated that he flirted with joining the Labour Party under Blair, but said he wanted to be on the liberal wing of a party instead of the hard-nosed, right-wing of a party. In September 2022, Boles wrote an article in
The Guardian, criticising
Liz Truss's government and saying that "Labour is the only party that can lead us out of this mess". Boles is a senior adviser at FMA, or
Francis Maude Associates, a consulting firm founded by
Francis Maude and
Simone Finn in 2016. ==Personal life==